Testing Without Assertions

Testing Without Assertions

At Buzzfeed, analytics is extremely important as a feedback loop to the content creators. They use a client side JS library to send these analytics events which is well tested; however, in early 2016 there were a series of data outages that prompted the team to revisit their testing strategy. Testing network requests to downstream systems can be tough. There’s only so far that Selenium tests can reach and you can often end up with tests that offer you false confidence in the complete system. In this presentation, Ian Feather will describe how they approached this problem and ultimately the solution they chose: using Sauce Labs to run continuous cross-platform tests against our production systems. Ian will share a real-life case study on how BuzzFeed knows their analytics are working correctly, a general technique for testing network requests to downstream systems, and more.